The Review: Academic Moralism and Its Discontents

An interview with Nicolas Langlitz, and more. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. Last week, the anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz, author of [Chimpanzee Culture Wars]( (Princeton, 2020) and many articles on philosophy, ethnography, and the anthropology of medicine, published an eloquent provocation in The Review, “[We Need a Less Moralistic Humanities]( Langlitz ranges across intellectual history to argue against what he calls our period’s “moral hyperthermia,” for which, he says, “overcoming a sense of self-righteousness” is an imperative correction. I spoke with Langlitz about the inebriating effects of moralism, whether anti-moralism can itself become an orthodoxy, and the relationship between today’s moralism and the contraction of the humanities. Here’s some of that conversation. You are careful to indicate that you’re aware of anti-moralism as its own tradition. You name versions of it across the longue durée. What does that mean for how you think about your own anti-moralism now? I think of the history of philosophy as allowing for a limited number of positions which are rearticulated in eclectic fashion time and again, always in response to current problems. So yes, there is a long tradition of both moralisms and anti-moralisms. In the past decade, we have seen a significant resurgence of moralism, presumably because our moral order is changing. The sociologists Campbell and Manning have described this as a clash between an established dignity culture and the birth of a culture of victimhood. When moral norms lose their self-evidence, you can expect more moralizing to ensue — both from advocates of the new moral order and from defenders of the ancien régime. It leads to what I call moral hyperthermia. In this situation, I think it’s important to reassemble a version of anti-moralism, as a counter-poison. It’s not a timeless philosophy but a strategic intervention. At some point things will change again, and then it might lose its value and you must put the emphasis elsewhere. Is there a concern that anti-moralism can harden into its own moralism or even into a fundamentalism of a kind? Sure. Anti-moralism is a normative project. That’s why I concluded the rejoinder to the original Hau article from which the Review essay was derived by pointing out that the figure of the devil’s advocate is a moral entrepreneur, although not one that invents new rules to create new forms of deviance and new types of outsiders but one that tentatively values as bad what many around him consider good and values as good what many ostracize as bad. Ultimately, however, I’m less interested in opposing than in sidestepping moralism. You can look at the world through other lenses. At one point you refer to yourself as a “recovering moralist.” A recovering alcoholic is somebody who remains an alcoholic even when dry. I think of moralizing as a kind of inebriation — you get high on your own self-righteousness. Even if I try to refrain from it, I can easily be tempted. So my days as a moralist are not over, they never will be. Moralizing is a perfectly natural cognitive-affective disposition. When I turn on the news in the morning and I hear what’s going on in the world, I immediately start to moralize in my head. The German-Nigerian literary critic Ijoma Mangold published a wonderful political diary, in which he described this “inner regulars’ table.” But when I write as an anthropologist I get to sit back and think: Isn’t there an opportunity to turn my moral outrage into curiosity, maybe about a position that I find extremely alienating or about one of the many unpleasant sides of human behavior, which millennia of moralizing have not been able to eradicate. This includes our tendency to see the speck in our neighbor’s eye without noticing the log in our own eye. Anti-moralism is not going to change that either, but by thinking before you write you can channel your intellectual energies elsewhere, which is especially important for the moral economy of anthropology. And remember that Homo sapiens has profited tremendously from evolving as a moral animal. Moralizing can benefit group life, usually when we cooperate in small communities with relatively clear-cut and widely agreed upon norms. But if you must comport yourself in a large pluralistic society where people subscribe to very different sets of norms, including nonmoral norms, then moralizing what others are doing tends to be destructive. In those cases, it does not bring deviants in line but fosters division. It sets people up against each other. In our late modern societies, that’s what we’re currently seeing in a big way. The humanities and the qualitative social sciences are undergoing a period of extreme contraction. There’s less to go around for everyone; there are entire disciplines on the verge of falling off the map. If there’s an intense spike within universities in moralism, how is it conditioned by these material realities? I believe that moralism is both an effect and a cause of this development. It’s an effect in the sense that academic moralizing is an attempt to become more relevant by signaling one’s partisanship in the big political controversies of the day that everybody is already extraordinarily upset about. Given that these issues are covered day and night on the national news and social media, the unbearable slowness of academic work puts this strategy at risk of becoming even less relevant because journalists and nonacademic publicists will have published a more accessible book before your university press has even started looking for reviewers. At the same time, moralism also contributes to the crisis of the humanities. Do you really need professors to tell you what’s good and what’s bad? And given that it’s a particular set of progressive norms that dominate most of the social sciences, you confine yourself more and more to one camp of the culture wars. When I studied philosophy in Berlin some 20 years ago, we worked through debates that had shaped the intellectual landscape of postwar Germany: Adorno versus Gehlen, Blumenberg versus Schmitt, Luhmann versus Habermas, Habermas versus Gadamer. These couldn’t be reduced to moral or political camps but they always had a moral-political subtext. You can observe how, as the debates went on, both sides crafted richer and more nuanced arguments. I don’t see that in contemporary American anthropology and in the American academy more broadly. The liberal-bias controversy in social psychology has been an interesting response to the problem in their field. My own response has been to play devil’s advocate. Of course, such ersatz viewpoint diversity won’t solve the crisis of the humanities and social sciences either, but if it inspired a few more people to renounce the primacy of the ethical and the political, it might help to revitalize our intellectual ecosystem. SPONSOR CONTENT | university of colorado denver [Learn how public urban research universities are making higher education work for all.]( ADVERTISEMENT SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY OFFER Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access and save 50% for the first year with this limited-time offer. The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [We Need a Less Moralistic Humanities]( By Nicolas Langlitz [STORY IMAGE]( Sometimes it’s OK to side with the devil. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | CONVERSATION [When Reading Is a Matter of Life and Death]( By Len Gutkin [STORY IMAGE]( The historian Chris Celenza discusses paranoia, philology, and the future of the university. 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